I remember the day vividly. Karen Brown. my lab partner, walked into biology claiming the President was shot. I thought it was one of those wild rumors you here in high school. It wasn't. It was Ironic I also learned about 9/11 in much the same way.
The rumor became fact when Mr. Keogen, the principal, came on the speaker system announcing what had happened and began playing the broadcast from a news station. I was stunned. And I reviewed what I knew about John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The first time I saw him on Television was at the 1960 Democratic Party Convention. I usually ignored politics, but I vividly remember Kennedy's acceptance speech, calling on Americans to join us and promising in that Baaaston accent "And we will win in November."
That was when I was in seventh grade, and it seems that I was the only one in our school who wanted Kennedy to win. At that time, I attended a school in a very upper class area (think horsey set) and so most of my classmates said they wanted Nixon, not because of who the man was, but because he was a Republican. But I wore a button that said "If I were 21 I'd vote for JFK. I bought another one a few years ago when I visited the JFK museum in Hyannis, Massachusetts. Anyhow, my man won and a year later the girls were styling their hair like JFK's beautiful wife, Jackie.
Of course, a year after that, we ninth graders were terrified by the thought of a nuclear war. Since we were young children, we had done "duck and cover" drills and by now we knew that if a nuke hit us the only good that would do would enable us to kiss our ass goodbye.
But we survived. But a part of us died a year later on Nov. 22. For my generation, many of us regarded the murder as a loss of innocence. Kennedy was a man who created in us a desire to serve America. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," was something we aspired to. It's ironic that only a few years later half our generation were risking death while serving in the military while the other half protested the government. If JFK lived, I wonder what our involvement in Vietnam would have been.
A moment in history. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson is sworn in as President abord Air Force One as Kennedy's widow, Jackie (right) looks on.
There has been a never-ending chain of thought about a conspiracy involving the death. I personally believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but only because I know Cecil Kirk, a sergeant with the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police Department, who analyzed a negative of a photo of Oswald holding the same rifle found left in the Texas school book depository building. Every camera's lens leaves certain patterns on the negative and under microscopic examination of the negative, it is certain that Oswald's camera took the picture. And it is certain the photo was never doctored.And of course, more of my generation's heros were also murdered. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Is it any wonder that by the end of 1968, certainly the most turbulent year of my generation, that we became cynical and apathetic? I often wonder how much we would have become involved with drugs if it wasn't for the trauma.
But that is history and it is 50 years. A day that was so important to us is given a brief note, worth perhaps a half a period, in the social studies curriculum in New York State where I taught. As our nation becomes older, we must cram more history into the same amount of time. I wonder what people will think of that day in another 50 years when those who lived through it are long dead?
Statue of John Kennedy in front of JFK museum in Hyannis, Massachusetts, where the Kennedy Family had its compound.
Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief, shining moment
That was known as Camelot
-- Lerner & Lowe, from their Broadway musical, "Camelot"
